apotheosis
by emptysummer
Summary: Gotham loves her heroes. Loves them enough to let them bleed. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This land belongs to the Bat.


Title: apotheosis  
Summary: Gotham loves her heroes. Loves them enough to let them bleed. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This land belongs to the Bat. 1k  
Rating: PG-13  
AN: Immediate reaction to The Dark Knight Rises.  
Fic a day 3

* * *

Everyman can become.

Gotham loves her heroes. Loves them unrequitedly. Of course, her love looks like madness, like two shots and two bodies and a boy without a coat over his shoulders.

Gotham's love looks like a bat, because everyman can be Batman. Everyman can be.

Become.

So Gotham's favored son, the closest thing Gotham has (had) to royalty, becomes the Bat. And the war for Gotham's heart becomes something else entirely.

Gotham loves her heroes. Her Batman and Robins (isn't the 'and' there pleasing to the ears), her Harvey Dents.

Don't give me that nonsense. Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Harvey died a hero. And there's the crux of the issue.

Because Gotham loves her villains too. Loves her Jokers, her Scarecrows, her Banes. Her Batman and Robins.

Back when he was just a hero (though there are few that argue that the Batman was ever _just_ a hero) Gotham wrote him a love letter in the form of a man. A Ra's al Ghul, a Joker, a Bane. One of them is it, the greatest expression of Gotham's love. In exchange Batman gets a city, a city that scratches bats in chalk (_spray paint/fire/blood_) into it's walls proclaiming- Abandon all hope ye who enter here. This land belongs to the Bat.

He doesn't want the city. He wants the girl. (_He was foolish then_.)

The Batman is less a hero more a symbol. Fear me, says Bruce Wayne looking into the mirror, half a joke. But the Bat looks out and behind him Alfred shakes his head and looks away.

Fear him. And Gotham does. Business moves from boardrooms to back alleys and the Bat still finds them. He's winning. The Bat is taking over Gotham and there is nothing his enemies can do to stop it. Bring on the joke then, it's a good one, gut wrenchingly funny.

Slip of the tongue. Bring on the Joker.

Throw a mad dog into the mix and shake. Shake and set on fire. Molotov cocktail to the heart and doesn't it burn beautifully. Gotham reels from the aftershocks. Because Harvey Two-Face Dent is coming. 50/50 and a shot to the heart. You're too late. Boom! Giggles the Joker. I win.

He's still laughing when they take him to Arkham. Elsewhere Harvey Dent empties a clip into the Batman and Gotham shudders. She loves Dent less for this.

Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Gotham does not love Jim Gordon. Because he is the hero she needs but not the one she desires. Gotham wants the Bat back (and in the Middle East, Talia Ra's al Ghul packs her bags for Gotham).

The ruins of the Bat signal becomes Jim Gordon's favorite place. Gotham still loves the Bat even if those in power do not. The powerful never loved the Bat, but the children? They loved him. And the criminals, the victims, the police loved him. Love him. In the tunnels every turn to the camps is marked with a bat, scratched into stone by the hands of the desperate looking for a bit of light.

He growls "I am the dark" but he's not. The Batman is the glimmer of sunlight through the skyscrapers. The thief tossing an apple to a child. The orphan catching sight of a man with bottomless eyes.

The Batman is a symbol.

There are stories about him, son of a criminal, a whore, a crime boss, the devil reborn. Bruce collects them, these permutations. Nobody comes even close the truth.

The Batman is a symbol. And Bruce Wayne is very tired.

He has lived long enough to know he will die out there. Martyred for a city and nobody will ever know his name.

Dent is a way out.

Gotham cries for her favorite son whispers (_you're needed and come home_) for seven years and he comes back a cripple. Well that won't do. Selina Kyle gets a nudge and Alfred Pennyworth weeps in the kitchens on the other side of the house, when Bruce, little Bruce of the skinned knees and angry eyes, comes home.

The girl is good for him. She'll challenge him for Gotham's soul and for the minds of every person in the city. That is what this is about, their minds. Their bodies an afterthought.

Welcome to the war.

A rookie cop makes a call to a mansion on the outskirts of town (don't call him Robin yet). Alfred mourns a man not yet dead (dead thirty years) and packs his bags. Selina Kyle seeks redemption (self-preservation wars with that).

The Bat breaks in Bane's hands in the tunnels marked with his image and Gotham's people mourn but Gotham, Gotham hisses good, the common thread through her sewers. Make him strong.

Gotham made him strong once in an alley coming home from the opera, (in the back alleys, rooftops, and penthouses) but the times have changed and so has he. He is not a young man anymore. It will take a pit, and all his fear to make him strong again.

The truth? Everyman can be Batman. Gotham already knows where to find another and Bruce Wayne isn't finished. Not by a long shot.

He climbs without ropes to become legend, and hikes out of the desert.

Gotham rumbles. Anticipatory. The storm is coming. It will wash them clean, all of the filth off their hands.

Wayne could not have walked away if he wanted to. A bat burns itself into the cables and pillars of the east city bridge. The city wakes cheering. Symbols to make a man. Or is it the other way round?

They know what comes next. So do you.

Everyman can become.

Bruce Wayne slips his myth, tossing the cowl into the waters of the bay. Weeks later Robin crashes through the waterfall hiding his origins from the world. The myth becomes the man.

He belongs to Gotham now, body and soul.


End file.
